Sudoku keeps Royal Berks patients happy

Sudoku and free car parking were used by Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust to keep patients happy over the Cerner Millennium go-live weekend.

Various initiatives were put in place to placate patients having to wait longer than usual in outpatients as staff adjusted to the new system, but these were largely not needed.

A spokesman for the trust said the electronic patient record system go-live went very smoothly last Sunday with hardly any clinics running over time.

“All the things we did in advance paid off,” he told eHealth Insider.

The trust knew that some outpatient clinics might run late, so it contacted patients beforehand to warn them.

Any patients who had to wait longer than an hour were given a refreshment voucher and some clinics had Sudoku and quizzes to keep patients occupied.

The trust reduced car parking charges to the minimum charge of one hour no matter how long a patient stayed. It also arranged for a large number of staff to park elsewhere to create more parking spaces.

“The big thing for us was if patients arrived and had to wait longer than usual they had to be warned in advance and the next thing people worry about is car parking so we tried to remove that completely, but largely it wasn’t necessary,” the spokesman explained.

In outpatient clinics, “hit squad” teams of EPR experts were on hand to offer help to staff and customer service volunteers were on hand to assist and reassure patients.

“But they weren’t needed at all because the clinics more or less ran on time,” he added.

“It went very very smoothly and continues to at the moment.”

The trust has taken the Millennium patient administration system, A&E system FirstNet and bed management system MPages.

MPages is a web-based platform using HTML5 and Java Script that pulls real time information from Cerner Millennium into a single, interactive clinical view.

EHealth Insider understands the Mpages system being used at Royal Berkshire has been specifically developed for the trust and provides a visual display of bed lists accompanied by clinical status.